Stormy Daniels' lawyer says hundreds of thousands of dollars streamed into an account for President Donald Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen from companies with business interests with the U.S. government. (May 9)
AP

In this June 22, 2017, file photo, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson listens as President Trump speaks during the "American Leadership in Emerging Technology" event in the White House.(Photo: Evan Vucci, AP)

WASHINGTON — Eight days before President Trump was inaugurated, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson walked into the same lobby of Trump Tower — with his own top lobbyist in tow — for a meeting with the president-elect.

"It was a good meeting, actually," Stephenson would later tell CNBC. "(We) had a lot of conversation about where his administration is going in terms of tax reform."

Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was also at Trump Tower that day, having arrived exactly 8 minutes before Stephenson. AT&T would not comment publicly about whether Cohen and Stephenson crossed paths that day.

But a short time later, AT&T would end up hiring Cohen as a consultant "to provide insights into understanding the new administration," the company said.

Cohen's role as an AT&T consultant was just one revelation made Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels. Trump and Cohen have admitted that Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 just before the election to buy her silence about her extramarital relationship with Trump in 2006.

The company said Special Counsel Robert Mueller asked about the payments last November as part of his wide-ranging investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents in the 2016 presidential election. The contract expired at the end of 2017, said spokeswoman Megan Ketterer.

If AT&T's explanation is accurate — that Cohen simply did political consulting — those payments show the lengths the company went to curry favor with the Trump administration, even as Stephenson alternated between praise and exasperation with the president.

AT&T says Cohen did no legal or lobbying work for the company, and his name does not show up on lobbying disclosure reports for the company. The company said Cohen was hired after Trump's inauguration — an event that the company supported with more than $2 million in contributions.

In addition to disclosing its congressional lobbying, companies are required to disclose their efforts to influence executive branch agencies including the president. Last year, AT&T directly lobbied the White House on telecom policy issues — including net neutrality — and on its proposed merger with Time-Warner.

Proposed Time-Warner merger

A central issue — which Stephenson would call "the big elephant in the room" — was Trump's opposition to AT&T's merger with Time-Warner, the media company whose properties included Trump nemesis CNN.

During the campaign, Trump vowed to block the merger. "As an example of the power structure I'm fighting, AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few," Trump said in a campaign speech vowing to "drain the swamp."

Stephenson has suggested that the Justice Department would have already signed off on the merger if not for Trump's opposition. "Those are the kinds of things that everybody looks at and says, 'What's going on?'" he told CNBC in February. The fate of the merger is now in the hands of a federal judge in Washington.

According to lobbying disclosure reports, AT&T directly lobbied the White House about the merger in 2017 and 2018, even as the case was in litigation. The lobbyist who did that work, Terry Allen of Fidelis Government Relations, received $60,000 per quarter from AT&T.

"I don’t talk to the press about my client work. You'd have to talk to AT&T," Allen said Wednesday. AT&T would not comment beyond its initial statement about Cohen.

Opposing net neutrality

AT&T has also lobbied the White House to oppose net neutrality rules that require telecom companies to treat all Internet traffic equally — a battle the industry won in December when the Federal Communications Commission, led by Trump-appointed Chairman Ajit Pai, overturned those Obama-era rules.

On other issues — especially taxes — Stephenson has been one of Trump's biggest cheerleaders. After Trump signed the tax cuts into law in December, Stephenson called it a "monumental step" toward economic growth and passed along the company's savings in the form of $1,000 bonuses to employees.

The White House heralded those bonuses as a sign tax reform was working, and Trump himself credited AT&T with getting the ball rolling. "Nobody thought that the companies were going to step up and pay all of these great bonuses to people," he said in January. "AT&T started it but they came up and they paid all of these bonuses."

Trump's chummy relationship with Stephenson was on display last June, when he invited CEOs of tech companies to the White House for an event showcasing emerging technologies.

Sitting directly to Trump's right, Stephenson reminded the president of the investments tech companies have made in America over the last decade, even as the rest of the economy was in recession.

"I just have to say about Randall, the job you'e done at AT&T," Trump replied. "Really a top job, and I want to congratulate you. That's not easy to do. Most companies would have disappeared. You didn't disappear, did you?"

But in the months that followed, the relationship showed some strain.

Boy Scout speech

In July, Trump gave a highly politicized speech to the Boy Scout jamboree in West Virginia. In the audience that day: Stephenson, the national president of the Boy Scouts of America.

Stephenson largely stayed out of the uproar that followed, in which the Boy Scouts repudiated the tone of the speech and denied Trump's claim that Boy Scout leaders had called him to commend him on "the greatest speech ever made to them.”

Then in August, Stephenson fretted publicly about Trump's newly announced plans to back out of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

"AT&T has made a rather large commitment to Mexico, in fact it's a $7 billion commitment, and we have a lot of capital at risk," Stephenson said at a town hall meeting with employees. "We hear words about NAFTA maybe coming down, it causes alarm. How should I think about that?"

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson arrives in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York Jan. 12, for a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump.(Photo: Evan Vucci, AP)